‘Curbed’ Chronicles Dying Days of New York’s Peep Show Culture

In 1977, when businessman Richard Basciano opened his 22,000-square foot Times Square sex emporium Show World Center at 669 Eighth Ave., the district was home to about 150 “peep show” establishments, including Show World. Today, according to a retrospective published by the site Curbed NY, there are only nine—and with rising rents and increasingly strict zoning policies, even those nine appear to be not long for this world. Three adult video establishments closed in the Times Square district in 2018 alone. One of those was the long-standing Show World, which shut down about a year after Basciano died at age 91. But even prior to his passing, Basciano had told the publication Crain’s New York Business that he planned to close Show World, because the real estate on which sits the building housing what had come to be known as “The McDonald’s of Sex” was simply too valuable, worth “millions,” according to The New York Times.  In fact, in the 1990s—when New York under Mayor Rudy Giuliani was aggressively redeveloping Times Square and pushing out the adult theaters, peep shows and bookshops that had dominated to district during the previous two decades—Basciano collected a $14 million “windfall” when the city condemned two of his other properties to make way for shiny new office buildings. Though Times Square redevelopment turned Basciano into a property magnate in addition to a porn mogul, he led the fight against the city’s long-running attempts to “clean up” Times Square, Curbed recounts. Basciano organized the “Coalition for Free Expression,’ a group of 107 Times Square business owners who successfully held off the city’s attempt to wipe porn off the face of Times Square through much of the 1980s. In 2017, a New York court upheld the city’s strict zoning ordinances that barred any porn-oriented business outside areas specifically zoned for adult entertainment, dealing another blow to the Times Square porn industry. But in the end, the real killer of the dying peep show business may simply be the real estate market. “Many people claimed that adult video stores depressed real estate,” constitutional lawyer Erica Dubno, who represented Show World, told Curbed. “But the truth is that real estate values have shot up in the area around Show World, and as a consequence the market factors are putting pressure on adult business.” Now, if the once pulsating Times Square area seems, as it is so often called, “Disneyfied,” that’s because it is. According to Curbed, the aggressive redevelopment of Times Square began with Disney, in the late 1980s, purchasing and refurbishing the New Amsterdam Theatre, which later housed a nine-year run of The Lion King, and became a centerpiece of the new, tourist-friendly Times Square. But as The New York Times reported, Disney refused to sign the New Amsterdam deal until adult businesses were evicted from 42nd Street. Photo By Jack Boucher, National Park Service / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain